Boldly Giving Up

Conditions: generically fine. 

Film Review: Star Trek Beyond.

It's been seven years since we were submitted to the awful Into Darkness movie.  Seven long years to try and get over it, even forget it a bit.  Turns out it wasn't long enough.  While we were away, the NuTrek crew have been having various episodic adventures on various planets, this time not put out in a TV show, so by the time the movie starts Kirk is basically tired of it all.  He wants change, he wants to do something else.  Fortunately, the plot happens.

He gets sent to a mysterious planet in a big dust cloud, which turns out to be a trap and before you can yell "Khaaaaaan", his ship's been destroyed, and the crew ends up scattered across the planet surface.  So basically the movie is a riff off Star Trek 3, but with chance taking the place of Klingons.  It feels very TV-like, switching among the various crewmate pair-offs before finally pulling them all together to come up with a plan to escape the planet by getting another old ship working again.  At this point we get an insight into the bad guy.

Played by Idris Elba, he basically doesn't like people very much, and wants to kill them all.  He's gotten hold of some ancient doodad and has a plan to do just that.  So in the end it's a big race between Idris and the crew of the not-Enterprise as they make their way off to some big space station.  It's not a surprise to find the director did some recent Fast and Furious movies.

Seen in light of the awful Into Darkness, this is an improvement. But that's not saying very much, I mean literally anything would have been better than that. So as a peice of entertainment, I think it really falls flat. Relying on jokey humour and a TV friendly plot, it feels like a cash in. Which considering the vast budgets they have these days, is about all we can expect. One classic song out of five.

- Peace out